Art depicting workers offers contradicting meanings of work in both capturing the dignity and pride of workers but also representing the struggles and hardships of labor. In Working-Class Perspectives, Sherry Linkon reflects on how these tensions manifest in a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery and argues that the exhibit neglects the precarious nature of work today.

Perhaps because of this historical perspective, the curators seem to define “worker” primarily as “manual laborer,” including factory workers as well as farm hands, newspaper boys, and construction workers. As this suggests, the exhibit skews toward men, though it does also include a “Jolly Washerwoman” and Gordon Parks’s famous portrait of Ella Watson, his version of “American Gothic.” The exhibit also has some notable gaps. Milt Rogovin’s steelworker portraits are absent, as are contemporary photojournalism by Carl Corey, David Bacon, Steve Cagan, and Michael Williamson.

The dignity of workers and the social value of their labor is a central theme, visible in familiar works like Lewis Hine’s photos of construction workers, a Norman Rockwell painting of a smiling miner, or J. Howard Miller’s famous and much-reproduced “We Can Do It!” poster of the woman who would become known as Rosie the Riveter. Less familiar images also echo this theme, including Dawoud Bey’s portraits of African-American small business owners – a barber and the owner of a barbecue joint — from his Harlem USA series, or Shauna Frischkorn’s striking large-scale portrait of “Kean, Subway Sandwich Artist” from her still-developing series, McWorkers.

The exhibit also captures tensions about work, which, as the opening commentary of the exhibit puts it, “influences how Americans measure their lives and how they assess their contributions to society” but can also be “exploitative, painful, and hard.” A number of images, especially documentary photographs by Hine, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and others associated with the Works Progress Administration or the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s, draw our attention to the struggles of the workplace – to child laborers, to poverty, to physical dangers.

Most of the images are portraits, focusing on a single worker rather than their context or the work being done, which reflects the exhibit’s setting in the National Portrait Gallery. These images take workers seriously, asking us to recognize the valor of their labor, their pride and competence, but also to recognize them as people. As the museum label alongside Frischkorn’s photo suggests, her work “brings our attention to the low social and economic status given to fast-food employees. The ‘unattractive and ill-fitting’ uniforms might be designed to make them anonymous, but Frischkorn pushes against this strategy to reveal each worker’s uniqueness.” Yet even as the exhibit encourages viewers to see each worker as unique, the repetition of the serious, determined, often tired look on so many faces makes clear that most working-class labor is physically exhausting and often dangerous.

This sense of work as struggle exists in tension with the idealistic claim of the introductory panel for the exhibit, that work is the “foundation of the philosophy of self-improvement and social mobility that undergirds this country’s value system.” Despite this statement, the exhibit offers almost no images that suggest upward mobility. Instead, we see portrait after portrait of workers who seem determined and resilient, even though their hard work is unlikely to improve their lot in life.

This may be even more true today, as working-class jobs become more contingent and precarious, than it was during the historical periods that are most represented in the exhibit. Danny Vinik summarized the contemporary and future reality of work in a recent article in Politico:

Over the past two decades, the U.S. labor market has undergone a quiet transformation, as companies increasingly forgo full-time employees and fill positions with independent contractors, on-call workers or temps—what economists have called “alternative work arrangements” or the “contingent workforce.” Most Americans still work in traditional jobs, but these new arrangements are growing—and the pace appears to be picking up. From 2005 to 2015, according to the best available estimate, the number of people in alternative work arrangements grew by 9 million and now represents roughly 16 percent of all U.S. workers, while the number of traditional employees declined by 400,000. A perhaps more striking way to put it is that during those 10 years, all net job growth in the American economy has been in contingent jobs.

In many cases, as Vinik’s article makes clear, contingent workers don’t look much different from the full-time employees they have replaced – in fact, they are often the same people. Vinik frames his essay with the story of Diana Borland, a hospital transcriptionist whose $19 an hour full-time job was reassigned to a contractor that paid her by the line, dropping her hourly wages to just $6.36, less than minimum wage. While she was discouraged, Borland found another job, but she worries about her daughter’s and granddaughters’ future. “Where is the American Dream?” she asked Vinik.

“Nine to Five,”

“The Sweat of Their Face” largely ignores changes in work, one piece does make the costs to workers of contemporary capitalism visible. Josh Kline’s sculpture “Nine to Five,” shows a cleaning cart stocked not only with spray bottles and scrub brushes but also the dismembered head and hands of a janitor. The title is ironic, since many janitorial jobs involve evening and night shifts. The piece exaggerates the idea of work as linked with identity, and in the process Kline critiques the dehumanizing effect of contemporary labor conditions.

Among the largest and most striking pieces in the exhibit is a John Neagle’s larger-than-lifesize 1827 painting of Pat Lyon. The almost 94-inch tall portrait depicts Lyon as a blacksmith, standing beside a large anvil in front of a fiery stove, his white shirt rumpled and open at the neck, a heavy leather apron protecting him from sparks, and an almost defiant look on his ruddy face. But it isn’t only the scale that makes this painting so striking. It is the story behind it: according to the online catalog of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which owns the painting, Lyon was wealthy and successful, which is why he could afford to commission such a large, heroic image of himself, but he asked Neagle to depict him as the blacksmith he once was, telling the artist that he did “not wish to be represented as what I am not—a gentleman.” For many visitors to the exhibit, this image of a wealthy man as a proud laborer is the first work they encounter. It is at once odd and fitting that the first image treats work as an idealized role, not as a real, material and social act.

In the early 21st century, it’s almost impossible to imagine a successful businessman asking a painter or photographer to depict him as, say, a Subway sandwich maker. The conditions of work in the contingent economy not only undermine what the Portrait Gallery calls “this country’s value system.” They also undermine the potential for workers to find pride and satisfaction on the job. That may be one reason Frischkorn refers to her photos of fast-food workers, which mimic the style of Renaissance portraits, as “ironic.” The images emphasize the workers’ humanity in an era when dignity on the job has become out of reach along with expectations that hard work will pay off in “self-improvement and social mobility.”

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon, who authored this post. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

The 1963 KKK bombing of an African-American church in Birmingham resulting in the death of four adolescent girls inspired Nina Simone to write protest songs. Decades later, Doug Jones made the successful prosecution of two of the bombers part of his Alabama U.S. Senate campaign against Roy Moore. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Sherry Linkon and John Russo discuss how history, politics, and culture are woven together in Christina Ham’s play with music, Nina Simone: Four Women.

Playwright Christina Ham sets her play in the bombed-out church in the days after four adolescent girls were killed there. Drawing on Simone’s 1966 song, “Four Women,” Ham imagines the fear and anger of four Black women with different stories and perspectives, including different class backgrounds and experiences with political activism. The play explores how the women might have responded to the bombing, using dialogue as well as Simone’s songs, including “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black”; “Sinnerman”; and “Four Women,” as well as “Mississippi Goddamn.”

The play presents a diverse quartet: the dark-skinned struggling Aunt Sarah; “high yellow” Saffronia, caught between the worlds of her rich white father and her less-privileged African American mother; the prostitute Sweet Thing; and—in place of Peaches, the last of the four women in the song—Nina Simone herself, who rages as she writes the song and argues with the other three characters. Their responses to the bombing and to the battles of the civil rights movement generally reflect their different experiences. Aunt Sarah is cautious about resisting, Saffronia supports Dr. King’s nonviolent and reasoned approach, while Sweet Thing doesn’t think the movement has much to do with her. Through it all, Nina Simone argues for more active, even violent resistance.

The memory of the Civil Rights era also drove opposition to Republican candidate Roy Moore, who told a supporter who asked him when America was last “great” was during the period of slavery. Many younger Alabama voters, especially African Americans, found comments like this – perhaps even more than Moore’s reported pedophilia – frightening. As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said “There’s no state in America where black people recognize the horrors of turning back the clock more than the State of Alabama.” Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson reported in the New York Times, that Black voters, especially, were “motivated” by concerns about specific policies that Moore might support, but “they also voted out of a more general concern that the country, in the Trump era, was going back to a place best left in the past.”

Those concerns were most visible in the strong turnout among African-American women in Alabama, 98% of whom voted for Jones, as did 92% of African-American men. While more than 60% of younger voters between 18 and 44 chose Jones, white men and women without college degrees – the poll data often used as a stand-in for working class — voted for Moore by over 75%. Among all white voters, only 34% of white women and 26% of white men voted for the Democrat.

While commentators have made much of Black women’s strong opposition to Moore, we would also do well to attend to Nina Simone and to Ham’s version of “Four Women.” In the play, the four women fight among themselves about their own identities and choices. For example, Simone dismisses Saffronia by calling her “good hair,” while Simone and Saffronia both goad Aunt Sara to take a more activist stand. These battles emphasize the way class, education, sexuality, experience, and ideas create points of tension even among people whom others might see as part of a single, well-defined group. That they stand together at the end of the play is not a given. It reflects a hard-won and tenuous solidarity.

What lessons can we take from the Alabama election and Ham’s play about the centrality of race and gender in American politics? The election reminds us that Democratic candidates will not attract the votes they need solely through campaigns focused on economics. They must attend to racial injustice and, perhaps more now than ever before, to sexism. Yet as the play reminds us, discussions of race and gender cannot ignore class. While the conflicts among the women in the play are rooted in multiple sources, education, colorism, and social class are central points of tension.

At the same time, the play suggests the power of a shared sense of injustice and frustration to foster solidarity across differences. As 2017 nears its end, many Americans but perhaps especially women, poor and working-class people, LGBTQ people, and people of color are angry about the injustice of the Republicans’ tax bill and their promises to cut Social Security and other programs that so many people rely on for survival. Many of us are worried about the current Administration’s non-legislative actions – cutting regulations, stacking the courts, backing out of the Paris climate change accords, and more. And we are frustrated that, so far, Trump does not seem to be paying any cost for his racist, sexist, xenophobic attitudes, much less for his persistent lies.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

The aggressive tactics that Joe Arpaio used against immigrant workers as Maricopa County Sheriff were not only racist, they also reflect class bias. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Mary Romero explains how Trump’s pardon of Arpaio normalizes xenophobia in law enforcement and leaves undocumented workers vulnerable to abuse.

To understand the impact of Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, we have to remember that the foundation for claiming that Mexican immigrants are criminals – rapist and drug dealer – was solidified in the legislation passed after the Oklahoma bombing to deter terrorism, which blurred the distinctions between “alien immigrant” and “criminal.” In previous laws, being an “alien immigrant” was an administrative violation attached to one’s status upon entering the U.S. without documentation. This category included people who had overstayed their visas or had expired green cards, as well as some other noncriminal circumstances. “Criminal aliens” referred to immigrants engaged in illegal behavior. AEDPA broadened the definition of “aggravated felony” for alien immigrants to include less serious convictions. The third category of alien immigrants are persons the state identifies as posing a grave risk to national security and are deportable as terrorists. By blurring the distinction between undocumented workers and criminals, the 1995 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) provided Arpaio the opportunity to enter center stage in the immigration debate.

Arpaio’s reputation as the “toughest sheriff” was not solely based on establishing a tent prison in the Arizona desert, banning coffee and cooked meals, or restoring chain gangs, but he first pushed the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) toward immigration law enforcement by offering ICE county resources to hold suspected “alien immigrants” and “criminal immigrants” until deportation. The formal partnership between ICE and MCSO allowed local law enforcement to engage in immigration law enforcement. MCSO was not only among the first local police forces to sign a contract with ICE; its agreement was one of the most expansive in the country. Along with obtaining military equipment to set up command centers during immigration raids, the MCSO, along with a volunteer posse, prioritized immigration law enforcement over local responsibilities.

A class action lawsuit, Ortega Melendres vs. Arpario, finally ended Arpaio’s career. Plaintiffs in the case identified a wide-range of MCSO policing practices in raids conducted between 2007-2008 that violated the agreement with ICE, such as using pretextual and unfounded stops, racially motived questioning, searches and other mistreatment, and often baseless arrests of Latinos. Deputies and members of the volunteer posse abused the unchecked discretion Sheriff Arpaio gave them, which established the conditions for these violations. In general, Arpaio condoned and participated in circulating racist commentary about Latinos, creating a general cultural of bias in the sheriff’s office. U.S. District Judge G. Murray ruled that practices based on race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies targeted Latinos during traffic stops on the presumption that they had entered the country illegally. This highly selective policing of Latinos cast a wide net, but it primarily targeted day laborers, and it resulted in some arrests of immigrants without documentation and even a few with minor offences. Businesses known to hire Mexican workers were targeted by following drivers to and from work. These raids were publicly reported as “crime suppression sweeps” but generally focused on law abiding alien immigrants. Selective stops of only persons appearing to be of Mexican ancestry reflected popular belief that Mexicans and other dark Latinos are immigrants, not citizens. The MCSO built on this problematic assumption by establishing a hotline for residents to report undocumented immigrants and criminals engaged in trafficking. Arpaio encouraged community support of his immigration law enforcement with ads like this: “HELP SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO FIGHT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION & TRAFFICKING CALL 602.876.4145 WITH TIPS ON ILLEGAL ALIENS.”

In 2011, Judge Snow issued a preliminary injunction against MCSO prohibiting further illegally targeting of Latinos. In 2013, the judge mandated changes to eliminate misconduct and future violations of the community’s constitutional rights by the MCSO. Arpaio violated court orders to audio and video record all traffic stops, increase training and monitoring employees, and maintain comprehensive records.

Court monitoring found that Arpaio ignored the order and had not stopped enforcing immigration enforcement. Judge Snow found him in contempt of court and scheduled sentencing for October, 2017. Even though Arpaio was unlikely to do jail time, Trump pardoned him on August 25th.

Over his 24 years as sheriff, Arpaio was accused of numerous practices of police misconduct, mistreatment of prisoners, abuse of power, misuse of funds, failure to investigate sex crimes, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, and election law violations. Over 2,700 law suits, concerning violations at the county’s prisons alone, were filed against Arpaio in federal and county courts. The cost of paying law suits fell on the shoulders of hard working taxpayers in Maricopa County. The pardon is not only another step in normalizing xenophobia and hate in immigration law enforcement and a move toward Making America White Again, it also serves to enforce the vulnerability of undocumented workers.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

Congress must act by the end of this week to save DACA, but they also face a deadline on another program that has helped immigrants from countries struggling with war, disasters, and environmental emergencies – Temporary Protected Status (TPS). In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, KI’s Jessica F. Chilin-Hernández explains why TPS matters for workers and for her own family.

By the time the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was announced in 2014, I had already benefited from another immigration relief program: Temporary Protected Status (TPS). In January and February 2001, my birth country of El Salvador experienced two earthquakes – a month apart from each other – that utterly devastated every aspect of life in Salvadoran Society. In order to help El Salvador reconstruct and get back on its feet, the United States extended TPS status to undocumented Salvadorans immigrants already in the U.S. I was one of them. Created by Congress in the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS was meant for people from countries going through environmental disaster and other extraordinary and temporary conditions or confronting armed conflict. Currently, the program is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

From a working-class perspective, terminating TPS would be catastrophic for workers and families. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) has estimated that 81 to 88 percent of TPS-protected immigrants just from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti participate in the labor market – well above the rate for the total US population at 63 percent. Indeed, many TPS workers have been in the US for so long that they’re now homeowners and entrepreneurs, and so they are very invested in their local economies. For example, Salvadorans with TPS must have continuously resided in the U.S. since the designation date of March 9, 2001 – that’s more than a decade of working legally and paying taxes in the U.S. Furthermore, the Center for American Progress (CAP) calculates that the loss of TPS workers would cost employers $967 million in turnover and reduce America’s GDP by $164 billion over a decade. Of course, working people represent more than just economic contributions, but you’d think that reports like these would influence rational policymakers. But this administration operates with little regard to facts, policy briefs by experts, or peer-reviewed research. Instead, it responds to the worst instincts in our politics, even excusing and allying with white supremacy. This is not rational. It is shamelessly racist.

TPS is a racial and environmental justice issue. The program’s primary beneficiaries are Black, LatinX, Asian, and Middle Eastern. We come from Haiti, Syria, Nepal, Honduras, Yemen, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Somalia, Guinea, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Liberia, and Sudan. All of these nations have historically been at the mercy of imperialist policies – by the U.S. and other countries — that pillage natural resources and do little to promote the well-being of residents, most of whom are people of color. For these countries, TPS was granted on account of either civil strife (usually the reason for Middle Eastern and African countries) and natural disasters (usually the reason for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean) thereby helping these countries rebuild what US Imperialism has destroyed. Thus, TPS is a form of humanitarian relief for civil war refugees and natural disaster victims that is also a form of reparations to formerly colonized working people of the world.

Similar to DACA, TPS beneficiaries like me receive provisional protection against deportation and permission to work in the United States for a limited period of time –no less than 6 months and no more than 18. In order to be eligible, immigrants from TPS-designated countries must be physically present in the U.S. on the date on which the program is designated for their nationality and must continue to reside in the U.S. In addition, the program does not grant permanent legal status in the United States, nor are TPS beneficiaries eligible to apply for permanent residence or for U.S. citizenship. In other words, working-class immigrants can be workers, but not residents let alone citizens.

My TPS work permit has provided me with many opportunities to pursue the American Dream by making it possible for me to join the workforce. It also allowed for me to file taxes – something that I’ve been doing since I was 17 years old. Since attaining full-time employment, I have been saving to purchase a home in Virginia for my mother. This is my greatest dream – the chance to honor my mother’s sacrifice by providing her with a home that she can call her own. Throughout my time living in the United States, I had never thought I’d be faced with the possibility of giving up this dream. Yet all of this changed on November 9, 2016. The morning after, I felt a fear unlike any I had felt before. The right side of my chest hurt, my stomach felt strange. I was hungry, but couldn’t bring myself to eat. I could just think of one thing: if Donald Trump’s DHS Secretary does not approve our renewals, then we’d potentially be forced to return El Salvador. As of today, I have 81 days left on my TPS work permit if the designation isn’t renewed by DHS.

Since the beginning of December, a number of actions have taken place in Capitol Hill to urge members of Congress to save TPS and pass a Clean Dream Act. The deadline for Congress to act is December 22 – the date Congress adjourns for the holidays. The urgency has escalated even more after Congress failed to include protections for immigrant youth in their spending bill fix. If Congress doesn’t act soon, then a number of Dreamers and TPS beneficiaries await deportation and an inhumane removal experience from US society.

As we have seen in recent years, more and more of our working-class brothers and sisters from the global south have had to flee civil war, genocide, economic exploitation, and the environmental effects of climate change – and that will almost certainly continue. Efforts have already begun to eliminate other venues for legal immigration, and the gradual termination of TPS is unlikely to be the end of the assault on immigrants under this Administration. If naturalized and documented allies do not step up to demand a comprehensive immigration reform that makes it easier for all workers, political asylees, climate change refugees, and persecuted people to pursue new beginnings in the United States, then we will forsake our responsibility to whose labor provided the capital to build the economies of developed nations.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 44 posts that were read over 128,000 times by readers in 189 countries.

Working-class women are becoming the face of the labor movement in Australia and inspiring unions to fight for feminist issues. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Sarah Attfield profiles three women unionists at the helm of the worker struggle in Australia.

One of the best examples of the power of women’s leadership is Sally McManus, the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the umbrella body for unions in Australia. McManus is relatively new in the job, but she has breathed new life into the union movement. This is not an easy task. Trade union membership in Australia has been on the decline for several decades, and government attacks have diminished the power of unions to strike. Going on strike in Australia is a complicated process, with individual workers and unions engaging in unprotected industrial action facing very heavy fines. Media representations of unions have generally been negative, often focusing on some corrupt individuals and descriptions of union delegates on worksites as ‘thugs’. A Royal Commission set up to investigate unions was intended to further reduce public support, but it did not reveal widespread corruption in the labor movement.

In one of her first interviews as head of the ACTU, McManus argued that the rules relating to unions need to change and unjust laws should be broken. She has since headed a campaign to ‘change the rules’ which is being endorsed by many unions. Her influence shows the power of working-class women as organisers and agitators, in Australia and around the world. McManus is an inspiring speaker. Her directness and emphasis on collective action reflects her working-class background and provides an antidote to the individualist nature of neoliberalism. She demonstrates the benefits of having working-class women in leadership positions.

McManus is the public face of the union movement at the moment in Australia, but she is not alone. For example, the New South Wales President of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), Rita Mallia, speaks on behalf of workers in the construction industry. Like McManus, Mallia spoke at the ‘Stop the War on Workers’ Rally, and she roused many cheers from the mainly male working-class membership of her union. Mallia has a law degree, but her working-class immigrant background shapes her understanding of blue-collar work and the lives of her members.

Michelle Parkin, a rank and file member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, spoke at the rally, too, talking about a recent campaign at her worksite. A machine operator at an ice-cream factory, Parkin was one of 140 workers facing reductions in pay and conditions when their employer (a large multi-national) applied to have their enterprise agreement terminated. The union fought back, and with the help of the ACTU mounted a successful boycott campaign of the company’s popular products, following the model of another recent campaign against a brewing company. At the rally, Parkin presented the perspective of a female factory worker – challenging the image of the blue-collar workforce as male.

As women move into leadership, they are also expanding the scope of union concerns. For example, women have pushed for unions’ campaigns to include domestic violence leave into workplace agreements and drawn attention to issues like the gender pay gap and sexual harassment at work. These women workers often describe themselves as feminists, which normalises the term among working-class industries and communities.

Working-class women’s involvement in the Australian union movement is not new, but their visibility as the public faces of labor is. In the past, most union officials have been male, but now working-class women are demonstrating their strength, determination, and skills. The union movement has a much better future with more working-class women at the helm.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 44 posts that were read over 128,000 times by readers in 189 countries.

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Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.Learn more